


The Eight Extraordinary Meridians

by noahfronsenburg



Series: Give and Take Universe [4]
Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Disabled Character, F/F, M/M, Not Beta Read, Not Canon Compliant, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV First Person, Rating May Change, References to Canon, Training Montage
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-05-20 14:31:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14896325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noahfronsenburg/pseuds/noahfronsenburg
Summary: “I want you to teach me how to Bloodbend.”





	1. yamen | 瘂門

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theslowesthnery](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=theslowesthnery).



> the [eight extraordinary meridians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meridian_\(Chinese_medicine\)) are a part of chinese medicine related to the flow of chi through the human body and are involved with acupuncture, acupressure, qigong, chinese alchemy, t'ai chi, and numerous other forms of traditional medicine. unlike the traditional meridians associated with internal organs, the eight extraordinary meridians are receptacles of powerful energy that are involved in the workings of the entire body and soul.
> 
> \-----
> 
> if you're not familiar with the rest of give & take i highly recommend at least going back and rereading part 2 of this series, the titular "give & take" because this is an almost direct follow-up. some other important things to know:
> 
> \- i have never watched korra past the end of s1, and while there are some oblique references to events that happened in the later seasons, none of it is canon to this au and i refuse to interact with it because its ableist as shit  
> \- this fic is going to get into the nitty-gritty of the functionality of bloodbending with a great deal of handwaving to the science of bending, but theres gonna be like. blood and bodies and stuff. in addition im playing pretty fast and loose bc the rules of bending are so poorly defined that im kinda filling space so if somethings not 100% with how canon bending is defined fuckit bryke doesnt do any worldbuilding  
> \- this is a gift specifically for @theslowesthnery on tumblr, who was the original ship captain for lieumon back in 2012, and whom i love and adore

 the yamen point, called the "mutism gate of the governing vessel", is located at the top of the spine just below the C1 (atlas) vertebrae.  
this point loosens the tongue, relaxes the spine, and reawakens the unconscious.

 

* * *

 

 

The sound of hail woke me.

Or, rather, the conspicuous _lack of_ the sound of hail woke me. I lay on the futon, Asami snoring softly next to my shoulder, her hair stuck in her mouth, and stared up at the ceiling above my head. I could hear the wind screaming and roaring, and the distant plinking of hail. I could _feel_ the pressure system coalesced overhead, raging and battering between the skies and the earth, the wind that whipped around the farmhouse. The distant hail, pounding out of the sky, was against the reach of my consciousness almost like cool dew on my skin.

I lay, hands folded on my stomach, the blankets a little knotted around my knees and ankles, and tried to figure out what it was that had woken me. Idly, I picked my nose, eyes closed as I dozed. The hail wasn’t nearby, but it _was_ nearby, just strangely distant. Separate. The pressure system was directly overhead, the cloudburst of the summer storm pounding down from above, but it wasn’t touching us. There was no hail crashing into the roof.

My body, accustomed as it was, as it had always been, to the drives and pull of the tides and precipitation, expected the hail to be nearby. My Bending reached for it, had woken me trying to grasp it, but the ice wasn’t close enough to get an easy hand on. I flicked whatever I’d dug out of my nose onto the floor and rolled to my feet, tugging myself out of my blankets.

Asami made a questioning noise, not really waking, and I shushed her, pulling away. It was chilly in the way of intense summer storms, when the barometer dropped hard and fast, temporarily cutting to the bone until the storm went overhead, and I tugged on a sweater from where I’d tossed it haphazardly over the back of the deskchair the night before and pulled my hair out after it, sliding the door to our room open.

The main room was silent and empty, except for the coals glowing in the firepit and the steaming kettle hanging above it, but the front door was open, and I went that way, leaning against the doorframe and looking out into the storm.

He was sitting in his large basket chair stuffed with pillows, his feet up on a small stool. He looked a lot smaller like that, even though he was half a head taller than me even in his dotage, dwarfed and thin and blue-veined in the cool night air. His shirt was old, worn cotton, dark red and faded with age, and not fully belted, just hanging around his chest. He’d wrapped himself in a flannel blanket, and over his legs he’d draped one of Lieu’s leather jackets, this one probably older than I was, the leather cracked and blistered and tearing in places along seams. His hood wasn’t up and his mask was left off, so I could see the scarring that twisted his entire head and chest, pale in the light from the open door.

He had a little hair left, but not much. A few grey, coarse strands in a hunk no wider than my finger fell over his face, still thick. He was holding a cup of tea in his hands, the clay cup tucked between his thighs, steaming.

He was probably keeping it hot.

We sat in silence for some time as the hail pounded above and I stared up into the sky and the darkness, trying to make out the edges of the bubble he’d placed above the farm. I couldn’t really see it, although I could _feel_ it, sort of, there in the distance, maybe twenty feet above our heads, clearing the house and the radio antennae and everything on the farm but the trees. “Did I wake you?” He asked after a time, his voice hoarse and quiet.

“The not-hail did,” I admitted. “How far do you have it held off?”

“Over the fields,” he said. He closed his eyes as we spoke, gently rocked his wicker chair back and forth, the body creaking slightly on its coasters. “It’s starting to give me a headache. I really thought this hail was going to be a quick thing.” It never usually lasted. “But it’s shown no signs of petering off.”

I grunted, and we kept standing there. “Want me to take over?” I offered, after a while, and he made a quiet noise that sounded sort of like a denial, so I didn’t press it. “Don’t burn yourself out,” I added, and he laughed.

“You’re not here to teach me, Avatar. I know what I’m doing. Luckily, I can sleep as long and late as I want tomorrow.” He turned to look at me then, a half-smile touching the remaining side of his mouth, his teeth and gums visible through the hole in his cheek on the right. He cocked what would once have been an eyebrow at me. He had to crane his neck a bit from his angle to see me properly, the cataracts in his right eye making him mostly blind on the side I was standing on. I was also talking toward his deaf ear, which was probably part of why he was craning so far. “I have an apprentice to water the fields for me.”

“Don’t get used to it, old man.”

Amon laughed, brief and quiet. “If you’re going to be awake, do you want to sit until it’s done? Feel free to reheat the kettle and bring out a bench.” I hesitated, and then went back inside and did as he’d suggested, pouring a cup of tea from the kettle, dropping in some leaves from the bowl beside the firepit, and I got the bench that sat next to the water pump outside the front door to sit beside him.

It was strangely quiet, in this pocket he’d made in the storm. Outside it the hail and wind were screaming, a gale trying to tear the world up by its roots. Inside it, we could hear that noise and we were still buffeted by the wind, but the storm proper was distant, held at arm’s length by the pressure he was exerting to keep the crops from being destroyed by the hail. Neither of us spoke, we just drank our tea and sat and watched the storm at the bottom of the front walk.

He’d extended the bubble just enough to keep our car from getting hailed on. I found myself smiling a little.

“So,” I started, gauging him to see if he’d talk. Amon, the way I remembered him, wasn’t taciturn—when he’d been leader of the Equalists, he’d used words as weapons. Now, as an old and sick man, he rarely spoke more than he had to. Lieu, who had once only talked in his shadow and was silent otherwise, did most of the talking for them now. He made a quiet noise of acquiescence, and I continued, “You just…boiling that water?”

“For the tea?” He laughed again. “Yes, I’m keeping it hot. Are you just warming the cup?” I looked down at the clay, which I was, actually, keeping hot with my hands. I flushed slightly. “Shortcuts are sometimes the best way, when you can find them.”

“I guess I forget a lot, that not everyone can.”

“It always has been your greatest weakness.” The way he said it, it wasn’t really a judgment. It was more like gentle chiding, reminding me that I’d forgotten to put my turn signal on or that I’d left a window open overnight. He wasn’t disappointed in me; he just knew I could do better.

“Have I gotten better?” I asked, after a few minutes.

“Yes.” I looked over at him, and found him staring straight ahead, into the storm. His eyes, one grey with cataracts that had overcome his ability to heal them back, and one still the pale ice-blue of a glacial core, were seeing something that was beyond both of us. “Korra, you don’t have to live that role. You never have, and you never truly could, even if you never Bent again in your life. The experiences of Non-Benders are not ones that can be replicated by even the most fervent attempts at belief.” He took a long sip of his tea, and looked at me. “I would know. Be yourself, and give them voices. If they can’t speak, give them a platform to talk. If they can’t stand there, only then can you put yourself in their shoes and say their words.

“Were you not one to think with all the elements first, and without them later, you would not be the Avatar.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled, looking down at the cup in my hands. “I know. But you still make me feel like a kid.”

“We’re all children, really, in the grand scheme of the cosmos. I’ve just got more practice at it than you.” He paused, and then shrugged his left shoulder slightly, the whole one. “When I was your age, I thought I had it all figured out.”

I laughed at him. “Yeah. Trust me. I remember.”

“Then let me be a lesson to you, young Avatar.” Amon shook his finger at me. “Don’t go trying to start any cults, religious sects, or terrorist organizations. These are poorly planned diversions, and will end with you exploding.”

“Do you regret it?” I asked. It slipped out without my meaning it to, and we stared at each other for a moment. Amon made a strange, unreadable face at me, and looked back over his farm into the storm. He didn’t say anything, and I was almost getting ready to apologize for being insensitive and brash when he said:

“Yes.”

Amon’s face was as dark and impenetrable as the storm was, and he did not look at me as he spoke. He didn’t really look at _anything_ , even though his gaze was turned towards the storm. He seemed to be looking inside, deep into himself. “Not for the reasons you think,” he added, lifting his right hand, haltingly, to touch the side of his face, where his skin was marbled, twisted, and ruined by scars and the inelastic whorls of decades-old burns. “Pain and deformity get easier with time. They start to become a part of the world around us, and while they do not ease, it does become easier to find yourself in that agony, and carve from it peace. No.”

Amon shook his head, lowered his hand. “I regret it because I should have always told the truth, from the beginning. I did not have the voice to speak for the voiceless, not without them knowing who and what I was. I am, and always will be, a Waterbender. It is a fundamental part of my very base self. I should have given the stage to those who could not make a stage for themselves. I should never have allowed mob mentality to rule myself and others; I should never have attacked children; I should never have tried to break those who were already themselves broken.”

Overhead, thunder rumbled, low and basso profondo. It made the hair on the back of my neck rise, static, and the window shutters of the farmhouse rattle.

“I once told Lieu I would do it again, because it brought us to happiness in the end. But I was younger, then, and foolish. I couldn’t see outside my own front door. No, Korra, I would not do it again. If I could go back and restart this life, I would lift them up on my shoulders and let my brothers and sisters use me as their weapon, rather than demand they become mine.

“There is nothing I regret more in this life than that I used the movement for equality as one for revenge.”

It was quiet, then, and after a moment, I felt the pressure abate, the bubble over our heads open. The rain came down, cold and heavy and drenching, and it crashed into both of us like a wave, like birthing blood, and I closed my eyes, felt it fold around my body as a friend.

I could hear Amon crying next to me, lost in the storm, and I reached out, set my hand on top of his without looking. I could feel his blood, pounding in his veins, hotter than it should be because of his constant fever, unable to sweat. He’d taught me, now, and I felt him turn his hand over beneath mine. I squeezed his fingers, and he squeezed back, and neither one of us said anything, in that enormous cacophony of sound, in that storm that felt like the end of the world.


	2. yang qiao mai | 陽蹻脈

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We’re here. Do you want to get out of the car? You could always go home.”
> 
> “Yeah, but then I’d feel like a coward.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> today's the 6th anniversary of the finale of lok! i promised this today for hnery
> 
> i hate bryke :) i own the gays now.

 the yang qiao mai, also called the "yang heel vessel" is one of the eight extraordinary meridian systems, and runs from the left ankle to the top of the skull, along the left side of the body. it is used to treat pain in the eyes and eye-related headaches, regulate the yang systems within the body, and can strengthen the lower limbs when afflicted with weakness.

 

* * *

 

 

I stared out the window of the car at the passing scenery, trees all lush and bright green with summer, until Asami jerked the parking brake upright and turned off the car engine. The Satomobile we’d driven out here was a newer model, not Asami’s old vintage from Hiroshi, specifically brought along because of the dirt cart-track roads, and it practically purred to silence.

“We’re here,” she said, eventually. “Do you want to get out of the car?”

I looked over at her and found her watching me, her expression unreadable. Asami had Hiroshi’s hair; it had gone grey about ten years ago, and now, just into our forties, she had a few streaks of proper white starting to grow out of her part, the waves of her hair falling to frame her narrow chin. She raised her eyebrows at me over the slim silver frames of her glasses. Stylish, always. “You could always go home.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But then I’d feel like a coward.”

She squeezed my knee, trying to be reassuring. “So, if it doesn’t work out, you go. But you can’t just sit in the car for the entire visit.” Asami took off her seatbelt, unlocked the driver’s side door, and pushed it open. She ducked back down to look at me. “Get out of the car, Korra.”

I groaned.

 

 

When I finally did get out of the car, Asami had already unloaded our bags out of the trunk and had heaved them up to the bottom of the front walkway and gone to meet one of our two hosts, who had come down the front path to greet her. Asami was leaning comfortably into his shoulder, her arm around his waist, laughing at something.

I looked down at my hands and closed my eyes. “Okay, Korra,” I said, hoping I would listen to myself. “Literally does not even rank on a top ten list of crazy terrifying things that you’ve done.”

It didn’t make me feel any better about this.

Eventually, I rounded the car, rubbing the back of my neck, and came up the front path to join them, Asami waiting for me with a patient, almost _indulgent_ , look on her face.

“There she is, in the flesh.” The Lieutenant, whose name I still didn’t actually know, looked at me like he was appraising some ailing plant that was struggling in his garden. My memories of him young were sketchy, fleeting things, but I could see the man I’d first met by seeing him kick the ass of everyone I knew in the old man in front of me. He had a narrow, sharp face, with high, pronounced cheekbones and jowls, the skin hanging loose around the bottom of his neck and throat. His black hair had greyed and thinned—unsurprising, considering he had to be almost seventy—but his mustache, in all its absurd catfish glory, was still quite robust. Albeit almost entirely white.

He had the skin of a farmer, now, not a soldier; sun-beaten and leathered, peppered with liver spots and scars both old and new. Around his neck hung a betrothal necklace, well-cared for and clean, despite the amount of dust, dirt, mud, and general farm-mess that clung to the rest of his body. He was wearing a pair of canvas overalls, sandals, and an undershirt that sagged slightly off of his rickety frame despite the amount of muscle I could see under his thinning skin—he’d lost weight recently.

Right. Asami had mentioned he’d had a surgery.

“So,” The Lieutenant said, still appraising me. “Spirits, I always expect you to be taller. We’ve never been properly introduced.”

“No,” I agreed. Even two years before, at the unveiling ceremony, he and Amon had practically disappeared into thin air the minute they’d been able to. Asami had known exactly where to track them down, of course, but it had been a little unnerving. I bowed briefly, and he returned it, and then stuck out my hand to him. “Avatar Korra Sato. Just Korra is fine.”

He took my hand in his, and his grip was _bone-_ _crushing_. He shook my hand like he meant to snap it off at the wrist, in one brief, brusque jerk. Businesslike. He didn’t even seem to intend to do it. His palms were scarred, his nails cracked and dirt-stained, but his hands were square all over with muscle. “Lieu Te Nan. Pretty much everyone just calls me Lieu.”

I stared at him. “Was that really,” I started. “Are you telling me that you. Is your name,” I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth, struggling with disbelief. “Was that a _pun_?”

He gave me a wry smile. “Got it in one, Avatar Korra. Let’s get your stuff up to the house, and then I can give you two the tour of the place.”

“Are you sure you should be carrying anything heavy?” Asami asked, and he waved a hand at her.

“Just don’t make me bend down to pick it up. I’m _old,_ Asami. Not _decrepit._ It was my knees that got replaced, not my heart. Sure, give me something to carry.” I still gave him the lightest bag, but he took it without any complaint, leaning on a rake as he climbed the path back up to the house, warning us off of a loose paving stone as we went.

I had seen the farmhouse out the window of the car as we had driven up the road. It was on top of a small rise, the fields not visible from the road below, with a stream running along the edge of the property, turning a waterwheel as it passed by. It was an old house, in good repair, but rambling—it had been added onto numerous times in its life. There were all the buildings I expected to see at a farmhouse: goosehen coop, a small barn, a grain tower. No outhouses; yes a well.

There was plenty I wasn’t expecting, either. The working waterwheel, the solar panels on the roof, the electric wiring that arced overhead from telephone poles, plugging the farm into the grid.

The fact that it existed at _all_.

“My father built it, when he married my mother,” Lieu explained, as he led us up to the house. “It fell into disrepair between when my sister died and when we came back after the Revolution, but the majority of the structure is original. We just rebuilt it after the roof collapsed in, added some more rooms, the usual.” The outside was distinctly Earth Kingdom, but when we stepped inside the front door and into the main room, I could see a lot more Fire Nation inside, the colors of the wood more red than brown. Decoratively, it looked almost exactly like the way Asami and I had our house decorated back home. Mixed, just like most families were now.

The floor was raised up a few steps, probably for flooding, and Lieu kicked off his sandals at the door. I copied suit, and Asami knelt down to undo the zip up the backs of her boots, setting them carefully inside, away from excess dirt.

“I’ll spare you the history lesson,” Lieu continued, waving us after him, across the wide-open floor of the main room. It was enormous, with a traditional style fire pit and cushions in the center, a modern kitchen in one corner, and a standing table with chairs as well as floor cushions. The windows were papered over, letting in light but not bugs, and there were no less than six doors, two off of every side but the front. “You guys will stay in the guest bedroom. There’s not an attached bathroom, but it’s across the main room, between the kids’ rooms on the east side of the house. Asami can show you where it is, Korra.” He opened the door—paper, bamboo and wood, it slid along a track in the ground, and stepped into a small bedroom.

There was a dresser (three drawers) an open window, this one not papered, and against the long wall were several large desks side by side running the length of the room all the way to the outside window.

Asami immediately dumped one of her bags on it.

There wasn’t a bed, but instead a large open space and a futon inside a closet. “It’s the workroom when we don’t have guests,” Lieu explained. “Feel free to unpack, wash, piss, whatever. I need to go finish with the front garden, and then I can give you a tour.”

I hesitated, following his lead as I set down the several heavy bags I’d been carrying at the corner of the wall. He was wiping the back of his neck with a handkerchief that had been tied through his belt. “Is Amon...” I began, worried for the first time maybe we’d come too late, or something.

“He’s fine,” Lieu replied. “He’s just busy. He doesn’t like to be interrupted when he’s working.”

“He has a patient here?”

“No, no.” Lieu waved a hand. “Not right now, anyway. No, he’s watering the back field. We can go check on him in a bit, but he probably won’t be done until dinner. So feel free to take your time.” I glanced toward Asami, who was already unpacking. She didn’t seem in any rush—but she’d been here, had found it normal.

I was the only one standing on the outside.

I hesitated. “Where’s the restroom?” I asked.

Lieu jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Across the main room. There’s the two doors to the kids bedrooms, just go in the one on your right and its the door to the left.”

“Okay, thanks.” Just make it normal. Don’t push.

 

 

We washed and unpacked, and I tried really hard to not become more impatient. We’d come all this way; driven out of the city, away from the world, Asami and I had put all of our responsibilities on an indefinite hold. I hadn’t even told anyone where we were going, a kind of secret visit that Tenzin had been practically climbing the walls to know more about. And now we were here.

And I was shoving my underwear into dresser drawers.

“I can _feel_ your stress,” Asami said, from where she was piling wrenches and screwdrivers on the desks. “They’re not going anywhere. Just relax.”

“Easy for you to say,” I grumbled back. “They’re practically your foster parents. They tried to _kill_ me.”

“And now they’re old men who live on a farm and curse at goosehens; the more relaxed you are the easier it’ll be.” She turned away from the desk and came over, set her hands on my shoulders, squeezed them. “Stop worrying. Stop freaking out. If it gets to be too much, you can always leave. You get along fine with Kuvira, you can handle this, too.”

Her hands, warm and strong on my shoulders, pressed the stress back, and I leaned into her touch until my head bumped into her shoulder, closed my eyes. “Yeah,” I sighed. “Okay. Let’s go find Lieu.”

He was standing in front of the house, cajoling a goosehen he had tucked under one arm and holding a basket full of cornmeal under the other. He stopped, midway through a tirade, and looked up to see us. “Let me go put this in the silo,” he said, gently dropping the hen back to the ground. It wandered off, squawking at him, ruffled. There was a story there, but I could guess, given by the bits of cornmeal on the bird’s beak and forehead, what had happened. “Let me show you around a little.”

The tour he gave to us of the front of the farm was brief and succinct. He pointed out the least- and most-friendly of the goosehens and the ostritchhorses, dumped the grain into the silo, and explained the way the house was organized a bit. He talked about the front gardens—home-crops, mostly, for subsistence only unless they had a significant excess, and their rice plot which just grew for themselves. He rambled about some of the more recent renovations done to the house with the help of their kids, and then, when we’d seen the majority of the property, Lieu took us around the side and paused.

“Just be as quiet as you can,” he said. “Amon doesn’t like interruptions when he’s doing this.” His warning given, Lieu went the rest of the way around the back, Asami and I following.

The first glimpse I got of the back of the farm revealed it to be essentially the same as the front, but I barely noticed the back field, because what I noticed was _above_ it. Far, far across the field, well over the halfway point, there was the glimmer of what looked like a thin sheet of water, and I squinted, trying to make it out clearly. It _was_ water; not possibly more than a finger thick, hanging suspended some foot or so above the top of the highest banks of corn. As we watched, I could see the sunlight hit where it dripped down.

“Does he do the entire field like this?” I asked, my voice low enough to not carry. Lieu leaned closer.

“Again?” He asked. “My hearing’s not great. Don’t worry about raising your voice more; he’s deaf on one side.”

I tried again. “Does he water the entire field like this?” Lieu nodded.

“In sections.” He gestured forward towards the open field. “He starts just after lunch and does it a half at a time, usually. It takes about four hours. It’s better for the plants, too, to get segmented watering rather than just kind of a maximum at random. He also checks for wilt, rot, weeds, sickness, rodents—he can tell you more of the details.”

I looked away from the sight in front of me, still reeling, to stare at Amon.

He was sitting on a wicker chair that was underneath a canopy off of the back of the house, his feet up on a stool. He was sunk deep into meditation, his hood hiding most of his mask, his body almost totally still. His chi was under such tight control it stunned me; mine never stayed that taut when I Bent. If I hadn’t known he was Bending, I would have thought he was _asleep_ , he seemed so relaxed. He wasn’t moving his arms at all, not even twitching his fingers. His breathing was even, and asleep in the dip between his calves was a black-feathered owlcat, rolled with its belly up in the air.

“He’ll be done about dinnertime,” Lieu concluded. “Let’s not bother him.”

I followed him and Asami, already talking about some project or another she wanted his insight on, back around the front of the house. He asked me to fix a hole in their front path, and I Earthbent it back into shape, returning the paving stone to the dirt, entirely without thinking. I was too stunned, really, by seeing what Amon could do. What I had come here to learn to do. The point of this whole trip.

It had been one thing to hear about it. It was another entirely in action.

 

 

It had started three years ago, after the dedication ceremony. In the chaos of the kidnapping, the attempted riot, and the arrests, Amon and Lieu had slipped away into the crowd and vanished before I’d ever even had an opportunity to speak to either one of them. And, in the days that followed, I’d not really had a chane to talk about it.

It wasn’t until about a week later that I was able to bring it up to Asami, who admitted she had invited them in the first place. I had always sort of assumed that the Lieutenant at least was still alive, but I’d never expected to learn the story I had from her about them. Their changed lives; Amon’s saving Mako’s life, years before. That they had been living out a totally anonymous existence as farmers for twenty years after Amon’s miraculous survival of the accident that killed his brother, and had come to see this small final tombstone on the labor they’d given their lives for.

Twenty years was a long enough time for me to learn how to, as Mako likes to say, _nut up and shut up_ , and they hadn’t caused any trouble and had been doing a great deal of good for their community, so I had no reason to do anything about it, except feel uncomfortable. Not frightened, not any more—not of two old men who had no problems with me existing out there in the world. Just _strange._

Asami came to visit fairly often, stopping by the farm and staying for a few days, and it had been a year ago she’d told me about Amon being so ill with pneumonia that his son had thought he might not make it. And it was Asami who suggested this visit, although the reason had been all mine.

When Amon died, there would be no more Bloodbenders, anywhere in the world. For good reason; it was outlawed sensibly. But there was something else, too—something that had always sat oddly with me. No matter how many advances we made to healing, no matter how many different ways were found to use Spiritbending and Waterbending to change and improve lives, there was one thing we _couldn’t_ do.

Stop bleeding.

When Amon died, the last secrets, the way to use Bloodbending to potentially save lives, would be gone. And so I had come, to learn from him, if he would teach me, and lock it into the Avatar cycle for good, so that someday, if someone needed it—at least. At least _we’d_ have it.

I’d known, sort of in a distant, disconnected way, that Amon was the strongest living Waterbender. Even Kya, who was still more Master to me than ever, wasn’t quite at his level, and my own strengths have always been toward combat and volume, not precision. But I’d seen him raise half of Yue bay, and now I’d watched him control a sheet of water so fine and thin I probably couldn’t have done one even half the size.

A long time ago, I’d seen him take people’s Bending, too.

Surely there had to be _something_ good that could come out of it.

 

 

True to Lieu’s word, at dinnertime Amon came in the front door, leaning heavily on his cane in his left hand at the owlcat at his feet, twining around his ankles in a way that looked like she’d make him fall and break his neck. “Heng, you’re being a nuisance,” he told her, gently shooing her with his foot, kicking off his sandals beside the door.

Despite the fact that the firepit had places laid around it for a more traditional-style meal, dinner was served at the full table—mostly, if I’d had to hazard a guess, so Amon could sit in a chair without putting extra stress on his body to get up and down from the floor. He greeted Asami warmly, asked her how our drive was, and remained chilly to me as Lieu served dinner, a proper stone-bowl bibimbap.

Amon’s was half the size of ours, and served with a spoon, his servings cut into smaller chunks.

I tried to ignore the way my heart fell into my stomach, through my pelvis, and out onto the floor.

The man I saw in my nightmares when I thought of _Amon_ was a robust Waterbender in the prime of his life, his body strong and hard and quick, decades of chiblocker training lending him speed, agility, and martial prowess that far outstripped mine. He still had dark hair in my memories, thick and wavy, with an unbroken voice.

The Amon that sat across from me at the dinner table was not that.

I’d seen him two years before, but he’d faded more since then. He’d lost weight significantly; his clothes hung off his frame in swathes, fabric dripping from his shoulders and wrists. He ate without a care for who saw him, his hood down from his head and his weatherbeaten porcelain mask set aside, revealing the scarred and ravaged face of a burn victim—a real one, this time. No makeup to be seen there.

When he spoke, his voice was raspy, like that of a smoker, ragged and worn with years of disuse and, as Asami had explained some time before, smoke inhalation from the accident that had killed his brother. His right arm moved with difficulty, stiff with disuse and muscle damage, and he tilted his head toward the table to put his left ear towards us, would turn to Asami on his right side whenever she spoke to hear what she was saying. His right eye, too, was grey with cataracts; a recent issue, he’d not had that a few years ago when I’d last seen him.

I’d long ago become used to people growing older and dying—the first time I’d really felt like An Adult was when Katara had died, and I’d sort of had to rethink and remake my entire life around that loss. But it was _different_ with someone who had once been a murderous threat. It was hard to reconcile this old, wizened man with a single silver forelock of hair, a twisted body, who fed scraps of beef over the side of the table to his cat, with the same man who’d once lashed me to the ground and scared me so hard I’d fainted.

I could still hear it in his voice, if I listened carefully. But even the tone, the timbre, had changed with age and damage and disuse. So I sat there, all through dinner, trying to find a ghost of the figure in my nightmares inside the man at the table, and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t make one fit inside the other. All I got was a sort of magic eye picture, where I had to unfocus and refocus my gaze just right, and even then, all I could see was the outline of the hood and the once-proud shoulders, now bent and twisted.

“You’ve been staring at me for quite some time, Avatar.” I jumped, halfway out of my seat, and found Amon had met my eyes. He’d set aside his empty bowl, and Lieu had replaced it with a smaller bowl of mung bean soup. I resisted the urge to flinch.

Amon emoted differently from most people; he had worn a mask for the better party of the last thirty years, so it made sense. Instead of lifting his eyebrows, he tilted his head slightly to the right, as if questioning me. “Trying to get a sense for the scars? I hope I’m not putting you off your supper.”

“No, it’s—not that at all.” Asami and Lieu, on either side of us, had somehow managed to go totally silent in some sort of circumspect avoidance. “I just...I guess I’m trying to find the Amon I remember in you.”

“There’s not much of him left, but be my guest to keep looking for him.” Amon set down his spoon. “I’m pleased to see you accompanying Asami to visit us, but don’t think I didn’t notice the amount of luggage spilling out of the guest bedroom. You two are here less, it seems, for an impromptu drop-in and more to stay for weeks, if not months. Even our _children_ don’t holiday here for that long.

“Korra, I’m an old man, not a stupid one. What are you here for?”

His gaze was _piercing_. Without the mask to modulate it, create a layer of shadow and resistance between his eyes and my own, I felt like he could cut through me with a look. He sat there in patient, expectant silence across from me, waiting for an answer. As if he wouldn’t let me get up from the table without one.

I wet my lips, glanced down at my hands, and back up at him. Took a deep breath, and dove in headfirst. “I want you to teach me.”

Now he did raise his eyebrows—or, at least, seemed to. The skin above his eyes lifted upwards, the scars wrinkling slightly, the elastic tissue shifting over his skull. “You’re the Avatar. What could I possibly have that I could teach you that you, or one of your previous lives, does not already know?” He knew. He knew, and he was going to bait me into telling him; make me put words to it.

I swallowed, and reached for Asami under the table. She took my hand in hers and squeezed, as if to say, _just do it_.

“I want you to teach me how to Bloodbend.”

Amon stared at me, unmoving. He didn’t do or say anything. Didn’t so much as blink. Then, slowly, he put his mask back on, pushed his chair back from the table, stood, picked up his cane, and without a single word he walked out the front door of the house and kicked it shut behind him.


	3. dai mai | 帶脈

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Why?” Amon said, staring down at me. He held up a hand. “One sentence. No more than ten words. Succinct. Mean it. You get one chance at this, and only because Lieu pled your case.”

 the dai mai, also called the "girdle vessel" is one of the eight extraordinary meridian systems, and runs around the waist, girdling the centre of the body. it is used to treat gastrointestinal issues and to balance the chi between the upper and lower halves of the body.

 

* * *

 

None of us knew what to say. We just sat there, stunned, unmoving, staring at the shut door. Asami’s grip on my hand had gone slack; I knew my mouth was hanging open. Lieu half stood, and then sat down again, and leaned his hand on the table. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I thought he might do this,” he said, half under his breath. “Sura asked him once and he yelled for probably two hours straight and then walked out just like this.” After a moment, he pushed himself up from the table, looked back at us. “Leave the dishes, I’ll clean up later.”

“Are you sure?” Asami stood, copying him. “I know where everything goes, Lieu, I don’t mind.”

He shook his head. “No, let me. It’ll help me center myself. You two go and do whatever; I’m going to talk to him. It might take a while.”

“Hurry up and wait,” I sighed, slumping in my chair a little. Lieu left, limping some, shutting the door behind him properly. In the ensuing silence, I rubbed at my eyes with the heels of my palms. “I’m gonna go take a bath, I guess. Since there’s not much else to do.”

“I’ll join you,” Asami sighed. We usually bathed or showered together; it was just easier, especially for her. Being married to the Avatar _did_ have its perks, like endlessly hot (or cold) water, rapid drying hair, and not getting out of the water and being freezing fucking cold immediately. It was nice, too, just taking our time and soaking together, talking over things. It helped in a lot of ways, to have a ritual most nights where I would just stop and _think_ with her looking in from the outside and helping me see where pieces I couldn’t fit together fell.

The bathroom that we were supposed to use had two smaller basins, so we bathed side by side rather than in a shared claw-foot tub like in Republic City, sitting on the edges to comb out one another’s hair. We had dried off, gotten into our pyjamas, and set up the futon by the time a knock came at the guest bedroom door.

I knew before it even opened that it was Amon. He had an extremely businesslike knock: brusque, abrupt, no-nonsense. There was no finesse to it. It was the knock of someone who was impatient and had too much to get done in any one given day. He pushed the door open before I could answer, and stood, silhouetted against the low light from the main room. Lieu had to have put out the overhead and left the firepit coals glowing.

“Why?” He said, staring down at me. He held up a hand. “One sentence. No more than ten words. Succinct. Mean it. You get one chance at this, and _only_ because Lieu pled your case.” I could read the glare he shot at Asami even through his mask. “And because Asami told me that the two of them put you up to it. If I like your answer, I’ll consider it.”

“Healing can do a lot,” I began, and then hesitated, counting the first five words out. I cursed under my breath. “But bleeding out still kills.”

I fistpumped, quietly. _Exactly_ ten words. Then I looked back up at him, and found his hooded eyes watching me.

“You want to use Bloodbending to heal.”

“I mean, that’s kinda the idea. Or, at least find ways to integrate it into healing techniques. Kya and Katara made so many strides in their studies of it—we can keep bodies alive during comas or when their spirits have fled, and Spiritbending combined with healing can essentially heal any wound. But if someone’s bleeding out, or they have internal injuries, nothing can really be done. They’ve been developing techniques for blood transfusion, but they’re imprecise, and the technology hasn’t really caught up yet. If healers could stop blood instantly, rather than using a tourniquet, or siphon blood from an injured area to vital organs, it could reduce so many casualties from industrial and farm accidents.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “A lot of the statistics show that internal bleeding from car accidents, factory mishaps, and misused Bending are the number one killers that healing can’t stop.

“If we had ways of utilizing Bloodbending, even just at full moons, we could reduce those casualties. By a lot. And I know you and Tarrlok don’t need a full moon, and if we could just—“ I sighed, looked back up at him. “Think of how many people wouldn’t have to die because some jackass punched them with a rock, or hit them with a big block of ice.”

“You’re not afraid it will be misused?”

“ _All_ Bending can be misused. Airbenders can rip the breath out of someone’s lungs and strangle them to death with it. You yourself know how badly Firebending and Waterbending can be used. Metal and Earthbending aren’t any better. The way I figure it is, eventually, someone is going to figure out how to do it again.” I sighed, felt my shoulders slump. “Someone is going to rediscover how to Bloodbend, and it will be just as hard to deal with it being misused as it was before. I don’t want to be responsible for a world that only has it as violence in it. I want to be able to use it for _good_. To make it not about killing, but about saving lives. Maybe if we can change the way it’s thought of, we can change the way it’s used, too.”

Amon kept staring at me. After a moment, he turned away. “Come with me,” he said shortly, and I scrambled out of bed, tripping over my feet as he led me back across the main room to the back doors. He took the one on the right, opening it into the master bedroom. There was another door, to the left, from which I could hear humming and splashing, steam rising out the doorway—the master bath, then. He bypassed that completely and went to a second door, out the back of the master bedroom, and opened it, walking down a few steps and flicking a lightswitch to bring up the lights.

I stared.

It was the tiniest room I’d seen in the house so far; probably no more than ten square feet of floorspace. The only things in the room were a small fountain in the northwest corner, facing towards the North Pole, a meditation mat of seal-fur atop a heavily cushioned area of the floor, and books. The walls were stacked floor to ceiling with shelving, and each of those was crammed to sagging with books and scrolls. They were a jumbled mess in some places, falling over one another. In others, they were perfectly rigid and organized.

I scanned the titles, still reeling from the reveal. Amon gestured for me to sit down and began to move about the shelves, pulling a few books off here and there and passing them to me as he went.

There were books on everything. Chi-blocking took up a good portion of it, as did chi theory in general. There were books on political theory and economics, books on history, books on warfare. There was fiction and nonfiction, biographies and yearly summation books from major companies and cities, guidebooks to the world, engineering handbooks, instruction manuals. Probably a hundred different books on farming, crop-keeping, animal husbandry, shipment styles, and the other necessary knowledge for farming. There were even numerous books on parenting and psychology. There were books on Bending science—for all four types, not just for Waterbending—and more healing texts I had seen outside of _anywhere_ but the North Pole. Many of the texts were ancient, crumbling, or looked like they had been painstakingly transcribed by hand.

It was a genuinely boggling amount of information.

When Amon had finished, he set his cane aside and very carefully sank down next to me on the floor, taking the books and piling them before me.

“How much do you know of healing?” He asked, pulling a fountain pen from a shelf, along with a pile of page-markers. These particular ones were of owlcat wings, and I decided not to comment.

“I passed the mastery tests,” I said, and he nodded.

“I assumed as much.” He set two texts aside, and pulled two other ones closer. “Healing is an imperfect art in many ways. The chi paths of the body, following the meridians, require a good bit of finesse to work to their best effect. Even then, certain water works better than others, and some people are more open to the healing process depending on their bodies.

“Essentially any Waterbender can figure out healing if they fuck about long enough,” he continued, opening the first book. It was a book entirely on anatomy, and he flipped through it until he came to sections that showed muscle and vein groups, and marked the page with a tab before passing it over to me. “The chi paths aren’t hard to find. Many Waterbending children heal themselves just by instinct; it’s how my father discovered that my brother and I were Waterbenders. It’s a much larger scale.” He handed me another text—this one was on chi and meridian points, and also showed the vascular system. “Bloodbending is an art of _precision_.” The next book was on animal anatomy. “A single air bubble in a vein can kill someone. You can break bones, explode the brain, twist the intestines until you cause sepsis.”

He looked up at me, and placed the last text onto my lap. It was called, _The Sea of Blood_ , and as I flipped through it, was all about the veins, the vein placement. I swallowed.

“Korra, if you burn someone alive they will die. If you crush someone beneath a ton of stone, they will die. If you drown someone, drop someone from three hundred feet in the air, _they will die_. But with Bloodbending you can freeze or boil a person’s body from the inside out. The simplest, most thoughtless of gestures can cut off all the blood to their heart and brain.

“You believe you can heal with this. I myself have done so—so I know it is a possibility. But if you want to save lives, you’re going to make sure that you don’t _murder anyone_ , either.”

Amon stood up, done with his tirade, and wobbled as he got back to his feet. He regained his balance, leaning on his cane, and crossed back in front of me to the door out of the room. “What...” I finally found my voice. “What _is_ all this?”

“Your homework,” he replied, shortly. “This isn’t healing. If you want to do anything as simple as cut off blood flowing, you’ll need to know which veins it is flowing from. You cannot do it by _instinct_. Consider this an apprenticeship.” He turned and looked back at me. “We harvest the corn and the rice in the fall. Between now and then, there are approximately four full moons, the first in two weeks.”

“So I can probably only do it four times,” I finished. I looked down at the papers. “So I have to learn all of this, so that when those full moons come, you can actually teach me.” He didn’t agree or disagree, but I knew I was correct. “So...what first, then, master?”

“Don’t call me that,” he snapped, but it wasn’t particularly heated, just ill-tempered. “Amon is enough. The first thing that you have to do is learn all of that,” he gestured at my texts. “And then, we’re going to practice your finesse.”

“In what way?” I asked as I gathered the texts and followed him back into his bedroom. He gestured airily with his right hand, kept close to his hip, and condensation coming out of the bathroom thickened in the palm of his hand as he sat down on the side of the raised bed. I stood next to him as it became a small ball of water, no larger than a marble. It was the kind of thing you practiced early on when you were training Bending, and he offered it up, passing it to me.

I set down the texts on the bed next to him, and took it in my hands. “What do you want me to do with it?”

“Break it into the smallest parts that you can hold without dropping them.” Amon held his hands apart. “Make a lattice.”

Furrowing my brow, I spread my hands, let the water peel into a sheet between them. Then I spread then wider, the sheet thinning until it began to wobble. Then, I started to siphon the water apart into smaller and smaller segments, until something like an owlcat’s cradle was hanging suspended between my hands, each join of the chain no wider than a toothpick.

I could feel sweat starting to bead at my temples. “I’m not really great at the precision stuff,” I admitted. I’d managed that mercury, years ago—with help. “Much better at larger scales.”

Amon reached up and set his hands atop mine. He wore gloves, to protect the damaged skin of his hands, but his touch through them was still unnaturally hot, and I shuddered slightly. “Thinner,” he murmured, and the lattice began to break down even more, his touch holding my own work steady.

It glittered like the finest lace gauze in the low light from the oil lamp in the corner. I swallowed—if I got distracted at all, it was going to drop. “Now?” I asked, still not sure what he was trying to show me.

“Almost,” he tugged my hands wider, and the net stretched, warped, and thinned again, Amon’s control over my own wavering strength exerting an almost iron-grip of exactitude on the water we were both holding. “Thinner still,” he added, even though the water net was now probably as wide as an eyelash, maybe.

Between my hands, it was twisting and drooping, and drops of water struck the ground. “Human capillaries are smaller still than this,” Amon said, easing off first his left hand, then his right.

The minute he let it go, the net hovered, for a moment, suspended as I grit my teeth and clenched my jaw and _held on_. And then it dropped, splashing down from between my hands and onto the floor below us. Amon swept it up and without even looking shot it back into the bathroom—I heard the distinct sound of a separate splash into tile.

My heart was racing, and my head hurt. I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Okay,” I said, when I sensed him still staring at me. “Point taken, mister bloodbending man. I might be able to literally split a continent or stop a volcano, but that’s going to do me literally no good at all when it comes to stopping bleeding in someone’s brain.”

“Precisely.” He almost sounded _proud_ of me. “So the first step will be to improve your precision and your stamina. There’s no freezing this water to keep it in place; that will rely entirely upon your own energy.” I nodded. “We’ll start with plantbending—have you done it before?”

“A little?” I started massaging my temples, cooling and rerouting my chi to stop it from pulsing hot behind my eyes. “I wasn’t ever much good at it. I tried to learn when I was staying in Foggy Bottom, but I never really got anywhere with it.”

“Then tomorrow will be a day full of revelations.” His voice, dry and tight with humor, made me glare at him.

“Are you _laughing_ at me?”

The porcelain mask, expressionless, hid his face, but I could still see the slight, subtle shift of the way it sat on his forehead as he raised his eyebrows.

“Me? Take some small pleasure in your frustration? _Never_.”

“Asshole,” I muttered, grabbing the books.

“Korra,” Amon called, stopping me just before I left the room. I turned back to him; he was unlacing the ties of his gloves, revealing pink, inflamed skin along the back of his fingers. “Farm day starts at sunrise. I’ll be waking you up at dawn.”

I mashed my face into the doorframe.

“What time is sunrise here?” I asked, dreading the answer all the way down to the soles of my feet.

“Five thirty, give or take.”

I groaned with the strength of a conviction that denied wanting to have to do anything earlier than noon that I thought had left me when I’d finished puberty.

 

 

I woke when the door slid open and Amon’s voice said: “Get up. It’s dawn.” He shut the door again, and I lay there in a fugue state, staring at the ceiling and listening to Asami breathe. For about five minutes I considered the pros and cons of forcing her to get up with me, and subjecting her to the torture of five thirty in the morning. I considered it long enough that Amon opened the door again, and leaned over me, his mask unreadable. “If you don’t get up, I will throw water on you.”

I groaned, and got out of bed.

Within ten minutes I’d crawled out of the house and stood blinking blearily in the last light of false dawn as the sun burned the clouds off at the horizon, rubbing my eyes as I got water from the well to wash my face, hissing between my teeth at the groundwater cold. I tied my hair back out of my face, into a single thick tail, and mumbled my thanks as Lieu shoved a bowl of rice porridge into my hands.

I ate it, not even really tasting it, because it wasn’t yet six in the morning and my mouth didn’t work right.

Amon and Lieu, used to rising with the sun, were already chatting as they finished breakfast and began to go about the day. Lieu wandered off towards the barn to let out the animals, but Amon sat patiently on the bench next to the well, waiting for me to finish eating. When I was done, he gestured for me to follow him, and I wandered in his wake down to the stream that ran beside the house, near the rice paddy. He kicked off his sandals and walked into the river, and I followed.

He hadn’t dressed yet for the day, and he was still in only a loose silk undershirt with a hood, no gloves, and sweatpants. It did give me some relief that he actually wore _some_ modern clothes, and didn’t look like he had totally walked out of the Hundred Years War. “Long Form,” he told me, “Both sides.” I groaned.

It had been a _long_ time since I’d done Yang Long Form. “Seriously?” I settled into Yùbèi, copying his motions, the water from the stream cool as I pulled it to my hands, let it flow with my heartbeat. “You know I’m like, _good_ , at this, right?”

“Yes,” he agreed, mirroring me. “But you’re here to learn, are you not? I told you last night, Avatar. Bloodbending is precision. You must be in utter control of yourself and your emotions.” Together, we moved into Qǐ shì.

I couldn’t help but notice his right arm, hovering a foot below his left, shaking with each motion. His water never wavered.

“A single wrong shift of your finger could kill the person you’re healing. This isn’t chi. This is their blood. You can’t just change the direction over the meridians. If you struggle with precision, then the first thing you must train is _precision_.”

I still groaned at him.

When we finished, the sun had finally risen over the horizon all the way, and it glared into my eyes as we trudged back up to the house. Amon vanished, probably to get dressed, but before he left he handed me a tomato.

“To eat?” I asked, staring blankly at it. He tapped it on the stem.

“Suck the water out of it, but do it without puncturing the skin. I want it done before I’m back.”

I was having uncomfortable flashbacks to being seventeen and getting my ass kicked by Tenzin’s wind machine slat party slap fest. “Great,” I muttered. “Be the leaf. I guess.”

 

 

I got it, eventually. It took me almost as long as it took Amon to get dressed, and when he came back he took the tomato skin from me and eyed it closely, before he peeled it open and showed me the weirdly desiccated inside. “You forgot the water in the seeds,” he told me.

I was starting, for the first time, to realize maybe I was not totally sure what I was up against.

After lunch, my wife vanished into the barn with Lieu to go look at some machinery or other, and I was relieved to find that Amon didn’t start harping on about plants. Instead, he took me to the river again, and took a small orb of water, turning it in his hands. It was no larger than an orange, and he passed it over to me. “Break it into drops in hundreds. See what’s easy, and set that as a baseline. Your goal is going to be no less than a thousand drops that you can ice back and forth individually.”

I stared at him like he’d grown a second head. “What the hell,” I said, and dropped the orb. “What are you gonna do, spend the entire summer treating me like I’m a _child_? You’re talking to me like I’ve never bent in my _life_!” He stared at me, his mask blank and unreadable. “What am I supposed to learn from this, precision? To be able to not burst someone’s capillary?” Frustrated, I dragged my fingers back through my hair. “Amon, I’m not eight! I’m _forty!_ I’m _the Avatar_. You could at least tailor the lessons to my level!”

He continued to stare at me in silence, and then he crossed his arms, held his cane shoved under his left arm. “Emotions control bending.”

“Yeah? I knew that when I was _four._ ” I stared at him. “Are you going to lecture me about how I have to be calm while I’m healing? Look, just because you knew me when I was seventeen and I was so hotheaded I was probably about to set my own hair on fire doesn’t mean I’m still like that.” Amon kept looking at me, his mask unreadable, and then he sighed and lowered his head.

“Walk with me,” he said, and turned to go up the river. He kept walking, not waiting for me to join him, and I hesitated for a few fraught seconds before I started to move, following in his wake and joining him, grinding my teeth in frustration.

The water parted for us just enough to make walking on the streambed easy. He clearly needed it, his steps slower and more faltering than mine. He didn’t look at me as we walked, his eyes set somewhere far ahead, his right hand held out just in front of him to Bend a path forward. I just walked alongside him, slowing my footsteps.

The stream led around the side of the house and along the back field, and I looked at it as we walked past, stalks of corn and wheat waving in the breeze. We weren’t that far from the ocean, I realized, looking out towards the east as we hit the top of the rise. It was a clear day, and in the far distance I could see a glimmer of silver on the horizon, just glowing along the edge of the curvature of the planet. If it was windy, you could probably smell it—the salt tang against the roof of your open mouth.

Still Amon walked, until we’d passed what was the edge of their property, out past the back field, and the cultivated land turned to nature, shrubs and grasses and wildflowers peppering the fields. There wasn’t any kind of forest here, just thick banks of verdure on either side of the stream. It began to deepen the further up we went, until it was up to our shins, and then our knees, our trousers getting soaked.

“So...” I tried, as Amon made a waterspout to lift him up a small waterfall, about two feet, and I followed, scrambling after him. “Are you going to...talk? Drop some wisdom on me, or whatever?”

“I’m not one for wisdom,” he replied, still not looking at me. “I’m not a particularly wise person. For example, I probably shouldn’t be doing this.” I paused, my foot hovering above the ground.

“Wh—“

Finally, he looked at me. “I assume you know I’m dying,” he said. The way you say something like _I assume you know the sky is blue_. There was very little inflection to his voice; nothing of fear or agony. He was stating a fact. Without fear. “Lieu prefers that I remain as carefully sedate as possible, so I avoid dying any sooner.” I could hear the humor in his voice this time, a gentle amusement on the part of his husband. Like Amon avoiding expending needless energy would give him extra time.

“Yeah,” I said, finally, rejoining his pace again. “Asami kind of...let that on.” We kept walking as I chewed over my words. “Do you know how long?”

“Perhaps midwinter of next year.” He glanced at me again. “Korra, don’t turn this into an agony. I’m dying because of what I and my brother did. I breathed a great deal of gasoline fumes and chemical smoke the day he killed himself. That I lasted as long as I have is a miracle.” He kept walking, the rise the house was on turned into a proper hill now, until we came to a waterfall.

All told, we’d probably been walking about an hour.

Amon pulled up a seat of ice, and I followed suit, sitting down directly in the water, since I didn’t need to worry about a fragile body the way that he did. The water here at the edges of the falls came up about to my breasts once I was sitting in it, and I could feel it relaxing me.

“You’re not a child,” Amon said.

We both stared into the waterfall.

“Bloodbending isn’t meant for precision,” he continued. “At least, not our present iteration. Perhaps some lost practitioners used it as such, but the version Hama developed was meant to kill. She wanted revenge on her captors and the world, and she made sure she had the weapon for it.”

“Katara told me about her,” I said. “How they met, and how she had to fight Hama with it. She—Katara told me she’d never felt ashamed of her Bending the way she did that night.”

“I never met her, but my father told stories of his grandmother.” I’d always suspected, but— “Hama taught my grandmother Bloodbending from as soon as she could Bend. It was meant to be a protection. To make sure she could hurt anyone who came anywhere near her, but it was done with cruelty. She taught my father. And my father taught me.” He held up his right hand, held it out in front of him, and clenched his fist. “Four generations, Korra, of _rage_. Four generations of children who grew up knowing that the one thing the world cared about was pain.

“Hama thought of Bloodbending as a tool for torture, and that’s all it’s been used for in my life.” He lowered his hand, sighed. “I’m not treating you like a child, I’m trying to find a way to put a sheathe on a naked sword. You want me to give you a weapon that could kill everyone you ever meet without you even trying. Every Bender, even the best, occasionally let their control slip.”

“The Avatar state,” I whispered, as it all came together in my head. “If I Bloodbent in the Avatar state, not using it intentionally, if my life was in danger...” I trailed off as a cold realization settled into the pit of my stomach. All the times I’d had to use the Avatar state without my own control, when it had taken over to protect me.

In the Avatar state, I could divert a typhoon; I could redirect a volcano.

“Oh, Spirits,” I whispered.

“You are very much not a child,” Amon said softly. “If you want to be able to use Bloodbending to heal, we have to turn it from a sword to a scalpel, and make it as precise as it can be. You cannot learn to Bloodbend the way that I did.” I pressed my face into my hands, and let out a shaking breath. I could see it in my mind’s eye—if not me, someone else. Some other Avatar. What if Aang had been able to Bloodbend? What if he’d done it during the War? Cities were growing all around the world; what if someone tried to assassinate me or a future Avatar?

I could kill literally thousands of people in a single block in the right part of Republic City.

“Okay,” I said, staring into the swirling water of the falls. “Maybe you’ve got a point.”

Amon laughed. “I probably went about it wrong. You’re not the sort of person who can just be told to do something and have it work.” He was right about that. “I had thought that if I broke Bloodbending down to the fundaments, there might be a way to prevent it from being as easily accessible a weapon. When using chi for healing it’s systemic, but, reversing and turning it to precision rather than total competence—“

“If I only used Bloodbending in localized areas, responding to the stimuli of the situation, I wouldn’t have the skill to control an entire body. That wouldn’t be learned. So even if I _did_ somehow use it during the Avatar state, all I’d do is like, break an arm or something.” I paused, added, “Hopefully.” I finally lifted my head from my arms and looked back at him.

I found that he was watching me, his chin on his hand, his eyes unreadable behind his mask.

I wondered what he saw.

“Yeah, okay.” I pushed up off of the riverbed and pulled the water that had gotten into my clothes off my body and back into the river. “So. I need to be able to pinch shut individual veins and activate single muscles first. Think small. Then stuff like how to make organs function, or how hard to squeeze a heart, and all that other stuff only once I can do the _real_ tiny things.”

“It’s astonishing to me,” Amon said, his voice frank, “How greatly you have changed for the better.”

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me on tumblr & twitter @jonphaedrus


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